Hillary Clinton has decided to take off the gloves and start attacking Rick Lazio by listing his "conservative" votes in Congress on TV ads. No more Ms. Nice Gal! The first lady realizes that Lazio has caught up to her in the polls and may soon move ahead. So, in a desperate attempt to destroy the "moderate" image of Lazio, she's going after the jugular: his association with those nasty Republican conservatives in Congress who oppose gun control, socialism, and enlarging the U.S. Department of Education.

But now, if Mr. Lazio would like some ammunition to use against the first lady, there is plenty available. One time-bomb waiting to go off is Hillary's long-standing promotion of "kiddy lib." She has written extensively in favor of expanding the legal empowerment of children. For example, she believes that children should have the right to sue their parents. Some critics see this as a potential stake in the heart of the family. I wrote about that back in 1992 in an attempt to inform readers of how radical the future first lady was. Believe it or not, it was the liberal Boston Globe that provided most of the information, probably in the hope that Hillary's radicalism would be a plus for many liberal voters.

Hillary's views drew criticism from a number of academics. Carl E. Schneider, a specialist in family law at the University of Michigan, remarked: "The fact is, once you transfer power out of the hands of the parents you're rather largely going to transfer it into the hands of the state. The question then is, what makes you think the state is going to do any better job than the parents?"

In 1992, a judge in Orlando, Fla., issued what is believed to have been an unprecedented ruling: an 11-year-old boy and his lawyers were entitled to argue in court that he should be legally separated from his natural parents and allowed to live permanently with another family.

That prompted humorist Art Buchwald to offer his "worst-case scenario": "Your honor, my client, 13-year-old Sophie Roundabout, wishes to obtain a divorce from her parents and younger sister because of irreconcilable differences. We are asking for 50 percent of all community property and custody of the family dog, Spot."

Those who are dead serious about changing the legal status of the parent-child relationship have advocated three basic changes, which Hillary outlined in the Harvard Educational Review in 1974: 1) The legal concept of "minority," which refers to the status of a non-adult, should be abolished, and the presumption that children are incompetent to make decisions for themselves should be reversed. 2) All constitutional procedural rights guaranteed to adults should be granted to children. 3) The presumption that parents' and children's interests are the same should be rejected.

A "competent child should be permitted to assert his or her own interests," Hillary wrote. In describing the child-parent dependency relationship, she stated, "Along with the family, past and present examples of such arrangements include marriage, slavery, and the Indian reservation system."

Of course, it was Karl Marx who railed against the bourgeois family, which he saw as an economic unit and wanted to see it destroyed in order to remake society in the new communist image. He and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor."

How much of Karl Marx did Hillary read at Wellesley and Yale, we don't know. All we know is that she campaigned for Barry Goldwater when in high school. Higher education obviously changed her views quite radically.

In 1979, Hillary wrote, "I prefer that intervention into an ongoing family be limited to decisions that could have long-term and possibly irreparable effects if they were not resolved. Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect the child's future should not be made unilaterally by parents." Who else should help make these decisions? A committee in the global village, of course.

According to David G. Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, the argument in favor of increased legal rights for children is based on the belief that "children suffer from an excess of informal, discretionary, sublegal parental authority. I'm sure one can find cases where that is true -- when a child is being beaten. But there are already laws about child abuse. Children suffer not from too much parental authority but from too little."

Hillary and others have argued that the state's interests are not identical to those of the children, and that therefore children require their own legal representation. Authority over children, or on their behalf, would be shifted not only away from parents but also away from governmental child-welfare agencies. It would be shifted to the courts. "I'd go so far as to say only a lawyer could have thought of this," said Blankenhorn. "I really think this is of lawyers, by lawyers and for lawyers."

Sanford J. Fox of Boston College Law School, who is chairman of a committee on children's rights of the American Bar Association, said those fundamental changes outlined by Clinton were neither radical nor impractical. "They all make sense," Fox said. "No child should be able to give up his right to a lawyer until he has seen a lawyer. ... There is nothing to lose by letting the court hear a child's perspective as well as the parents' perspective."

If that's what Hillary believes, then why hasn't she spoken out for Elian Gonzalez's rights, violated by both the American and Cuban governments? The American government kidnapped Elian and delivered him into the hands of his father and his Cuban communist controllers. As a result Elian has been forcibly brainwashed by communist agents protected by American officials. Never in our history has such an abominable action been committed by a president and his attorney general. Elian's brainwashing is now so complete that he sent a Father's Day greeting to "Father" Fidel Castro, the red dictator who has brought more misery to the people of Cuba than anyone in that island nation's history. Over a million Cubans have fled the island because of him.

Where is Hillary's outcry? Where is her defense of this child's right to his own lawyer? The silence is deafening. We hope that Rick Lazio asks Hillary these burning questions.

Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education, including: "The Whole Language/OBE Fraud," "How to Tutor," and "NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education." His books are available on Amazon.com.